A black guy in Japan?

There's this website called Overheard in New York, which I think would adore the title statement, since I heard it from a vigorously expostulating guy walking behind me in the Village, said with tones of some scoffing. To his Asian friend.

I'm leaving New York today, after wandering the city for almost a week, two days of which were spent in a tiny town near Woodstock, NY (one of the street signs out there said "Mountian High Rd." -- yep. Just like that.) reclining in a hammock for approximately seventeen hours a day. It's hard to go wrong with a summer schedule like that.

Since I last wrote here, I've:

- been to the free Philharmonic concert in Central Park
- feared for my life at the free Philharmonic concert in New York -- if you were ever going to be trampled, the hordes of pretentious yuppies bearing picnic baskets full of wine and Brie would be a terrible way to be trampled. I mean, what about elephants? But at least we got to see a little Asian boy whip it out and pee on the sidewalk right in front of us. Everything is better with pee.
- finally figured out how to do several tricks on the hula hoop that were eluding me! God bless you, Monique!
- ate a pound of organic steak
- listened to two good humored street musicians sing Easy Like Sunday Morning in Washington Square Park
- paid $5 for a cupcake by accident
- watched a girl and a very tiny dog run past. She didn't have any pants on. Or if she did, they were very tiny.
- wandered around the Village for a whole day, pretending I was as cool as other people who pretend to be cool in the Village.

There was more, but it all blends together into a morass of city-ness.

I don't actually like big cities that much. The only reason I'm going to the big ones (NY, Philly, LA) is because they have people in them I want to see. Instead of visiting the city, I'm visiting the people. Usually, I prefer to stay as far away from big cities as humanly possible.

I'm not even a country girl, actually; I was raised in the biggest city on Prince Edward Island. Given, at the time, that was about 14,000 people, so that's not saying much, but I've never climbed a tree. I've always seen cars whizzing by my house. I've never been able to see the stars at night, unless I'm camping or someone hits me on the head with a comical hammer and the stars are accompanied with little tweeting birdies.

But cities leave me cold. They're too big. Too many people. They smell bad. They're expensive. Everyone wants to live there, and something everyone wants to do is hardly worth pocket change, for my twisted elitist Connecticut thinking. I learned it from my mom; she made me memorize the states in New England when I was five years old ("Not New Jersey!"). Sure, there's stuff to do in cities, but there's stuff to do outside of them as well, and I've always been better at entertaining myself than following someone else's lead for what I should be doing.

How about you: country or city?